Anthropogenic Disaster and Sense of Place: Battlefi eld Sites as Tourist Attractions

Abstract

Disasters are commonly associated with large-scale catastrophic events causing material destruction, economic and social hardship, loss of life and suffering. They are often unanticipated and unpredictable with consequences that last long after the immediate crisis itself. In popular understanding they are normally seen as the result of natural phenomena on a large, newsworthy scale. But disasters can also be man-made, as successive oil spills, nuclear incidents, industrial accidents, explosions and insidious environmental degradation attest. Although definitions of disaster tend to support a sense of accidental causation, war and deliberate acts of terrorism can also be included in this anthropogenic category. War is certainly a disaster for those caught up in it, both for combatants and non-combatants alike, and is often accompanied by the attendant suffering of famine, epidemics, homelessness and population displacement, both within and outside of theatres of conflict. Moreover the emotional and mental suffering of war is totally incalculable. The destruction of war is arguably more catastrophic than most natural disasters: World War II resulted in the deaths of between 60 and 78 million people, whereas the most deadly recorded natural disaster, the Bengal Famine of 1770, killed 10 million (Bowen 2012).